Michael Arnowitt had a dream. Some people are content to celebrate birthdays with cake and champagne. But Arnowitt, a brilliant Montpelier pianist, wanted to mark his 50th birthday with a “musical fantasy.” He read that Arthur Rubenstein, one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century, would occasionally play several concertos in one concert, so Arnowitt decided to “throw caution to the winds and try to do the same.”

That’s like saying that since Wilt Chamberlain once scored 100 points in a basketball game, you would celebrate your birthday by rounding up some pro ballplayers and “try to do the same.”

Earlier this month, Arnowitt’s fantasy became a reality. He raised some $19,000 from 170 individuals to hire a professional orchestra. He composed two original pieces of music for the orchestra, including one featuring a jazz quintet. He took Bach’s Italian Concerto for solo harpsichord and composed an arrangement for piano and orchestra. And he attempted to perform not one, but parts of three major piano concertos. In one concert.

There’s another detail that makes Michael Arnowitt’s musical fantasy even more remarkable: he is blind. Yet he continues to set his sights on far horizons.

A child prodigy

I find Michael Arnowitt in the modest home where he lives, a short walk from downtown Montpelier. He extends his hand with his long, slender fingers in greeting. His thin face is crowned by an unruly mop of black hair. He keeps one hand on the kitchen counter to locate and steady himself.

Inside his home, my eye is first drawn to the wall that is lined with records and a turntable — a decidedly old-school stereo setup that reminds me of my parents’ living room, right down to having many of the same records I grew up with. The place is pleasant if a bit disheveled. We sit at a small kitchen table with an empty seltzer bottle and a box with a half-eaten chocolate cake on it. The mess doesn’t faze him because he can’t see it. He has retinitis pigmentosa, a hereditary degenerative eye disease that has steadily rendered him almost totally blind.

(Page 2 of 7)

As I sit about three feet away from him, I ask what he can see of me.

“Nothing,” he replies matter-of-factly. He stares a bit longer then asks, “Are you wearing glasses?”

No, I answer.

He smiles impassively. “I can see outlines of things, but not details. I thought I saw something reflect off your face.”

As for the mess, he explains with a gentle laugh that he sometimes has trouble finding the trash can. Things pile up.

Regardless of his disability, Arnowitt could live a very different life if he wanted to.

“Michael could make his career in any of the big cities, but he chooses to live here in Central Vermont. So we have a great treasure here,” says Catherine Orr, music director at Montpelier’s Unitarian Church. “He is an inspiration, and I’m grateful that he chooses to live here with us.”

Arnowitt grew up in Lexington, Mass. His father Dick taught theoretical physics at Northeastern University while his Korean mother , Young-In, looked after Arnowitt and his younger brother Myron.

Arnowitt’s musical talent was evident from an early age. When he was 4 his mother asked Frances Lanier, the founder of the preparatory school at the prestigious New England Conservatory in Boston, if her son could study piano there. She was told they wouldn’t take him until he was 7.

“What am I going to do? He wants music now!” Young-In pleaded with Lanier.

Lanier finally asked pianist Angel Ramon Rivera to hear young Michael Arnowitt. “That first day we had our first lesson, it was a magical lesson,” Rivera wrote. “I think we went almost through the first book.”

Arnowitt says it was “my great good fortune” to spend the next 10 years studying with Rivera.

Rivera taught the young virtuoso to be a musician. “Music can sound very mechanical — but Mr. Rivera would often write in big letters on my music, BREATHE. Breathing pauses make music sound human. And he taught me about the breaks and silences between the phrases and the gestures of notes.”

Arnowitt was a rising star. He debuted as a soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra when he was 12, and was the youngest player accepted to the prestigious Aspen Music Festival. He was also emerging as a talented composer. In high school, his parents wanted him to continue his studies at the renowned Juilliard School of Music. So each weekend Arnowitt’s mother drove him to New York City.

(Page 3 of 7)

“He had the talent for the kind of career trajectory that you see world class artists taking,” observes Scott Speck, conductor of the Joffrey Ballet and other orchestras, who has known Arnowitt since they were both 20. “But that’s not what he perceived to be important in the world.”

At Juilliard, Arnowitt got a glimpse of how top level artists were being groomed to make it professionally. He didn’t like what he saw.

“Each teacher was hoping their student would become the next Itzhak Perlman or some other virtuosi that emanate from that place,” Arnowitt recounts of his impressions of Juilliard. “Somebody asked one of the more promising students what he thought it would take to become a professional pianist. His answer was, ‘Nerves of steel.’” Arnowitt breaks out laughing as he tells me the story.

“It’s so far removed,” he says. Mr. Rivera “emphasized that a student needed to be a person first and a pianist second. If all you focus on is making trills faster, you are not going to become a very deep player.”

Arnowitt graduated high school in 1980 and attended Yale University. But he left afer a year and a half, saying only that he “didn’t find it challenging or interesting.”

In 1983, Arnowitt decided to take a long bike trip from Maine to Vermont to Virginia to “clear my head.”

“Trying to be this performing pianist and just dealing with the whole career aspect of it just seemed so impossible,” he recalls. He liked Vermont when he biked through, so decided to move to Montpelier.

“Sometimes people come to a point in life where they want to change, and instead of doing something more sensible and going only slightly off in a new direction, many times people will go to the opposite extreme,” he muses. “You can say Vermont is the extreme opposite of New York City.

Leaving the big city also meant leaving big city dreams behind. When Arnowitt moved to Vermont in 1983, he walked away from his piano with no plan to return to music.

“The idea of trying to have a pianistic career from Vermont didn’t really cross my mind at first. I guess it’s the young person rebelling against the future that everybody around them has set up for them.”

(Page 4 of 7)

Arnowitt worked a series of odd jobs around Montpelier to support himself. He also became deeply involved in the peace movement and tried to raise money for local peace groups. He published a newsletter, “Peace Soup,” that he distributed around town. He scraped by trying to support himself and his activism. In 1986, he married Susan Reid (they divorced in 2005.)

At a party at his Montpelier house one evening, some friends were playing drums and banging on pot lids. Arnowitt casually walked over to a piano and began to play. Conversation abruptly halted. Heads turned.

“I guess my piano playing seemed pretty different to the partiers that night,” he says modestly.

Friends quickly realized that the quiet, unassuming peacenik had a rare talent. When he finished, there was stunned silence.

Finally, a friend spoke up. “Maybe you could hold a concert raise money for the peace center.” That was 1985. A dim light bulb suddenly flicked on for the pianist.

Arnowitt returned to Boston and began practicing in earnest to prepare for his concert. The genie had been released from her bottle.

“Playing music probably is my calling,” he reflects, “so I came back to it.”

Dreaming big

Michael Arnowitt dreams big. His musical career has been marked by ambitious, unique and inspired performances. He teaches as he performs, pausing between pieces to share his musical and intellectual insights with his audience. He has toured all over Europe and the U.S. and performed with major orchestras.

In 1989, when he was 26, he launched a 26-year long presentation of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas, performing each piece at the same age that Beethoven was when he composed them. He is down to his last three sonatas, which he expects to perform in 2016 .

In 2000, he was artistic director of the Vermont Millennium Music Festival which featured music composed between 1000 and 2000. It entailed 24 concerts over four days at venues around central Vermont.

In 2004, Arnowitt was the subject of a documentary film, Beyond 88 Keys, by Vermont filmmakers Susan Bettmann and Jeff Farber, which chronicles the pianist’s unique personal and musical journey.

(Page 5 of 7)

“It’s supposed to be a study in aging and development,” he says of his Beethoven cycle. I ask Arnowitt how he thinks Beethoven’s deafness affected his music. He wraps his fingers around a tea cup and considers the question.

“Beethoven’s music is extremely personal,” he replies. He speaks in a near whisper, forcing me to focus intently on him as if I were at one of his performances. “He was turning inward because of his disability. I think it might have contributed to his finding music that was very universal. That’s the paradox — though Beethoven was not able to lead a perfectly normal social life [like] a nondisabled person, he really plumbed into his heart and expressed musical utterances that such a large number of people can relate to.”

I asked him how his disability — he was first diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa when he was 9 — has shaped him.

As his vision deteriorates, he concedes, “It is a social handicap for sure. ... Like the title of Duke Ellington’s autobiography, ‘music is my mistress.’ It’s a constant social companion of mine. And another thing to be thankful for.”

Arnowitt shows me into his studio, where a sleek Steinway baby grand piano sits next to an elaborate computer magnification screen. The computer projects one line of super-magnified music at a time. It now takes him about three months to learn a new piece of music in this way. It would be like reading a book and memorizing it, line by line.

In the last decade, Arnowitt has delved into a new medium where his repertoire is unlimited: playing jazz.

“The great classical composers at the beginning of the 20th century and the great jazz performers weren’t really in separate worlds. They listened to each other’s music a lot,” he reflects. Around 2000, he began practicing jazz every day. He also reached out. “I asked some local players if I could play with them and learn some things from them.”

(Page 6 of 7)

“His jazz playing is wonderful,” says Hinesburg jazz trombonist Dan Silverman, who has played and performed jazz with Arnowitt for the last 10 years. “Many classical players are too inhibited to play jazz, because you are prone to making mistakes. Michael has been able to transcend that. ... He hears music not as classical or jazz, but just as music. That has to do with his abilities, which are pretty unique.”

I pulled into the Montpelier High School parking lot on Jan. 6 to attend Arnowitt’s 50th birthday gala concert. Every parking space around the school was full. When I entered the auditorium had to scour the 600 seats to find an empty one. Everywhere I looked were familiar faces; musicians and activists, students and grandparents, young and old. It seemed that all of central Vermont had come to celebrate a half-century of Michael Arnowitt.

Arnowitt’s old friend Scott Speck strode onto the stage with Arnowitt on his arm. The slender, modest man who has enriched Vermont’s cultural life beamed. The professional orchestra that he hired sat on stage.

Arnowitt took his seat at a Steinway grand piano which was rigged with bright overhead lights that shone directly on the keys to help him see better. He opened with an exquisite rendition of Bach’s classic Italian Concerto that he arranged for piano and orchestra. Then came a premier of Arnowitt’s own piece, Haiku Textures. The whole auditorium took on the form of a haiku poem and musicians took up positions in the front, sides and back, one of the ways Arnowitt evoked a musical version of the poems.

And then, a jazz concert broke out. Arnowitt’s Bulgarian Hoedown was a foot stomping composition for jazz quintet and orchestra. Arnowitt’s spirited jazz licks were punctuated by driving drums and Dan Silverman’s high energy trombone solos. People tapping their feet, nodding their heads, and soon standing on their feet.

The concert ended with a heartfelt performance of the Brahms second piano concerto, a virtuoso tour de force that Arnowitt has long dreamed of performing. With the 20-hour days he put in preparing the concert, Arnowitt sheepishly admitted to me later, “That piece was a little bit above my ability to play at the current moment.”

(Page 7 of 7)

The audience was nevertheless wowed and appreciative.

Arnowitt’s connection to his audience is extraordinary. Indeed, when I ask his musical colleagues and fans about him, one word keeps popping up: love.

Conductor Scott Speck told me that the concert was a highlight of his musical season — one that included Speck conducting cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

“The way that this community responded with so much love for him showed me how music can really change people’s lives,” he said.

Arnowitt muses, “One way the concert summed up my first 50 years was that I enjoy bringing people together. I seem to periodically to get the yen to do these big projects. It brings me some happiness to bring together people and provide them an experience that would never have happened had I sat on my duff.”

Arnowitt is now preparing for a spring concert at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. And then there is the next milestone, as his mother has suggested to him.